Dear NBIA Users,

We're pleased to announce release of version 4.4 of the National Biomedical Imaging Archive (NBIA), available at http://imaging.nci.nih.gov. This release significantly improves end user functionality and back end administration as explained below.

Create and share custom lists of images

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A logged-in user can now create a "Shared List" that forms a saved list of image series which can be easily shared with colleagues or published in journal articles for convenient access to the exact set of data used by the list creator. It can be created based on cases added to your Data Basket or by uploading a CSV spreadsheet of the series UIDs for the images. Other users can then retrieve your list for download by searching on the name that it was assigned.

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The Shared list search and edit functions can be found in the Tools menu on the left hand menu bar:

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Improved Quality Control and Reporting

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The QC Tool (Quality Control) has been a completely redesigned to improve performance and usability. It now includes ability to quickly scan image series via the Cine Tool as you perform QC as well as a new worklist-driven interface to improve productivity. An administrative deletion function has also been added to make much easier cleaning the system of image submission errors. This functionality is role-based, allowing initial deletion by QC analysts, but permitting an archive administrator to make final approvals to prevent accidental deletions.

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In addition to these quality control and image management features, Reporting functionality has been improved. Using the Submission Report tool administrators can easily tell when images arrived, which collection they belong to, and how many patients/studies/series/images were submitted. The Report has two separate views. The first is an Image-based view which allows drilling down through the identifiers of the images in order to troubleshoot submission problems. There is also an Accrual-based view which is geared toward easy reporting of submission statistics.

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Better integration with collection metadata

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The Search interface now includes tool-tips next to each Collection name which can be clicked to view a short description of their scientific value. Within each tool-tip there is also the ability to add links to external resources, such as a wiki or publication site which has even more information and metadata relating to the images. The "Collection Descriptions" link on the left can also be configured to point to a site which has more detailed information. In the case of the CBIIT installation of NBIA it will direct users to a wiki which contains more information on all collections in this grid node The administrator is able to modify the description of the collection with a rich text editor implemented in NBIA.

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Redesigned Federated Search

A redesigned Remote/Federated search interface has been implemented to automatically discover remote NBIA nodes. If multiple nodes of NBIA are discovered on caGRID it will display them so you can select which nodes to search. It also provides the searchable terms available in each node. Federated search is not available through Dynamic Search in this release.

Fixes to Dynamic Search

Some minor fixes were applied to the Dynamic Search functionality. Dynamic Search allows users to search all fields of the NBIA data model. This includes the ability to query 75 different DICOM tags.

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For more information:

Detailed release notes can be found on SVN.

For groups interested in installing NBIA 4.4 locally, the full installation package as well as an upgrade installer and associated documentation are available on SVN.

As always, support is available from Application Support.